


Protostar

by Greyrey-lo (Punkpoemprose)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, I apologize in advance, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kylo Ren Redemption, Leia dies for the plot, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rendemption, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-18 12:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16118915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punkpoemprose/pseuds/Greyrey-lo
Summary: Protostars are, in a sense, pre-stars. They are the celestial body forming from clouds of particles that collapse under their own mass creating the visible light we see throughout the galaxy. Ben Solo and Rey of Jakku know a thing or two about falling in on themselves to create something new.This is the story of how they managed to do so together.Post TLJ, canon compliant. Rendemption.





	Protostar

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I had so much fun writing this for the Reylo Fan Fiction Anthology! I haven't created a lot for this fandom as of yet, but I'm so excited to be a part of it!

Takodana

Something is chewing through his gut as he holds her in his arms, and he blatantly lies to himself for the first time since he began calling himself Kylo Ren. He lies as he tells himself that the strange feeling he can’t name is coming from the annoyance of not having the droid, the interruption of Resistance fighters, the presence of Han Solo, and anything but what he knows to be true.

He shifts his feet on the durasteel floor and tries to think of how he can justify his interest in the girl in his arms. He finds her infuriatingly intriguing, and as he thinks of the way she faced him in the forest below, he tries not to be discomforted by how oddly familiar it feels to be looking down at her resting form. It is like he met her once before, or as if he’s known her since the very start of it all, and yet he knows that this is the first time that he’s been in the same space as her.

It was for those reasons that he refused to allow the troopers to carry her to his ship, and why he refuses to listen to the part of his mind that reminds him that he doesn’t usually treat his captives as tenderly as he treats her. He decides to write her off as a trivial curiosity that would be merely interesting to investigate as he extracts the map to Skywalker, because he knows that anything he believed would be what his master believed as well.

He can’t think of the way he feels concern over the lightness of her body, as if she were only bones beneath her wraps. He can’t brush her hair back out of her eyes and wake her gently no matter how much he wants to. He has to lie, otherwise he might begin to recall his weakness. He might have to acquiesce to the claim that he carries too much of his father within him. He might have to admit that he cares too much for individuals to truly make the galactic impact his master has been promising for years. He has to lie to tamp down the light.

Yet he can’t bring himself to set her on the cold metal to his side, and he refuses to shackle her, at least for now. He keeps a gloved hand on her temple, keeping her under gently, but refusing to pry. He tells himself it’s because he would rather enjoy the challenge of finding what he wants while she’s awake and he hides the truth in the corner of his mind where he keeps everything he hopes Snoke will never find, because truth be told he sees more inside her, and he knows that he doesn’t want to take anything from her that she would not freely give.

He’s certain that he’s gone mad as he stares down at her chapped lips and finds them the most familiar of all.

_S_ _ weetheart,  _ he thinks, and his chest aches as he locks the word away. That, he tells himself, is due to the lunge of the ship as they take off and leave the forested planet with its ruined castle behind.

Millenium Falcon

Her soul was cracking. It was the only way she could describe the pain she felt after Chewie launched the remainder of the Resistance off the surface of Crait and into a sea of stars. She told herself that the ache would dull the further she got from him, as if she could outrun the pleading look he had given her as the doors closed. It was too intimate, too raw, something that she hadn’t expected from a bond that should have been severed with the death of Snoke. She tried to hush her doubts about him causing their connection.

At the very least, it was a bond that she had hoped, for a moment, would end with his death, but she knew now that wasn’t truly what she wanted at all. She knew what she wanted even if she couldn’t voice it or act upon it. Her desires didn’t seem to truly matter very much when they never had before. It didn’t matter on Jakku, and it didn’t seem to matter to those around her now. It certainly hadn’t mattered to him.

She took a deep breath and latched onto the thought as the last sensible part of her brain begged her not to think about him, because it was the part of her that knew that she didn’t shut him out when she closed the door on the ship. It was the part of her that forced her to look around at the rest of the Resistance with a guilty conscience, knowing that if she was allowed a moment to give in to her wants, she would run straight to the escape pods and jettison herself overboard just to send herself back to him.

That was the part that messed with her head the most. She was furious with him for refusing to take his own advice, but despite her anger with him over nearly killing everyone she cared about and about nearly killing her, she would go back to him in a heartbeat. He understood something about her that no one else did, not even Finn, despite their commonalities, and not even Leia with her sensitivity to the Force. His sadness, his betrayal, his loneliness spoke to her own. He’d said that she wasn’t alone with him and she’d believed him, even reciprocated.

She sat among them now, the people she’d saved, the ones that she was attempting to blend in with and call her own. Leia’s hand had been warm and maternal on hers, Poe had thanked her and Rey saw a possibility for a friendship within him that might compliment the familial affection she’d found within herself for Finn. Despite the fact that she barely knew the rest of the remaining Resistance members, she imagined that she could at least have a comradery with them. But with Ben there had been more.

Her fingertips still prickled with the sensation of touch when she thought of him. Her heart knew the exact number of beats it had taken for him to slide his glove off, and even if she was blinded, she’d never forget the way he’d looked into her eyes when they reached for one another. She knew that she should only be thinking of him as Kylo Ren, the monster that nearly destroyed everything she had, but she could only think of the man behind the metal. She could only think of the man who’d killed his own master, the man that had gone against everything he had been told about himself, the man who’d offered the universe just to have her at his side.

She wished that she’d had the words to tell him that she had only wanted him.

Her fingers gripped too hard at her thighs as she pushed it all away, as she forced herself to focus on her anger. It boiled in her belly, refusing the allow her the calm she deserved, and she relished it. She knew it wasn’t what a Jedi should do, but she wasn’t a Jedi.

While those around her whispered hushed praises of their hero, the holy knight trained by the legendary Luke Skywalker, Rey was spending her time seething and lusting over a man who’d very nearly had her blown out of the sky. She was a barely trained Force user who could lift rocks and barely fought against the seduction of the dark. She was no Jedi, she was a woman who’d lost everything, a woman who had almost been killed by the man who she had begun to love.

_ I didn’t know. _

She couldn’t see him, and she was certain that he couldn’t see her either. Yet, it was his voice in her head. It wasn’t Kylo Ren. He couldn’t make it easy for her by sounding like the mechanical monster she was able to loathe. No, it was Ben; Kylo’s modulated voice could never sound so breathless, so wet, so rueful.

_ I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think that you were… _

She knew what he meant. She had the feeling that maybe he didn’t know she was on the Falcon. It was everything she wanted to hear, but she forced herself to stand, to shake him from her mind, to force him out. None of it mattered. The fact that he was willing to kill someone, to blow the ship out of the sky, to let everyone she loved die, it was the same to her as his willingness to kill her. Of course, that was another lie she told herself because it did matter. It made all the difference in the world in the worst conceivable way.

“Kriff.”

She said it out loud, under her breath, but it was loud enough to catch the attention of a woman sitting near her, and that was enough to make Rey walk away. She needed to be alone.

Of course, it was easier decided upon than done. There wasn’t much privacy on the ship to begin with, and now that it was packed with the remainder of the Resistance there wasn’t much room where there wasn’t someone standing, sitting, or even worse, talking.

She decided that she’d allow herself to take what she wanted, even if only just this once. There was a room she knew of, a small but a comfortable one that was just to the side of the Captain’s room. Chewie had already let her take it once, so she decided that it was hers now. The benefit, of course, being that it was the only room on the ship beside Chewie’s and the Captain’s quarters that had a lone bunk. The logical part of her brain decided to pop up again and remind her that it should probably go to one of the remaining Resistance’s higher ups, but she felt as though after all she’d gone through, she was allowed one selfish demand. They’d all almost died today, but she imagined she was the only one that would do a better job processing it all while being entirely away from others.

The door opened easily after her thumb punched in the passkey on the Aurebesh code lock,  _ Chandrila _ . The lock code still had no meaning to her beyond the obvious that it was the planet that hosted the council of the New Republic, but meaning wasn’t something that she particularly dwelled upon when she needed to get her door open.

The room was cool and dark when she entered, and once the door sealed behind her with a click, she allowed herself to slide to the floor and fall apart. She’d go take the pilot’s seat over from Chewie soon, but for now she needed the time to cry and crawl into bed. She prayed that she’d have a dreamless sleep as she crawled her way to the bunk. Once inside, exhausted and wishing for the first time that she could return to her AT-AT on Jakku, she put her mind to work building up walls to keep unwanted visitors out.

Ahch-To (Falcon)/Coruscant (First Order Throne Room)

Of course he’d known that it would happen someday. It was something that no child liked to think about, but he was no longer a child. He hadn’t been a boy for a very long time, and he’d told himself that he’d killed off the last of the one who had once been within him. But when he felt lips press to his forehead in the middle of a meeting, a feeling that had once been so familiar to him, he felt him reemerge for a moment. His heart rose and fell, then he immediately closed himself off to the feeling. He needed to, knowing what the moment meant. If he’d allowed himself to be open he would have wept.

He wanted to do so now.

She was the last person he would have expected to hear anything from, and yet she was the only person he could possibly hear it from. Even more importantly, she was the only one he wanted to hear it from. He sat alone in an empty throne room and looked at her. She looked far more comfortable, sitting on a bunk in his father’s ship that sat nearly empty on a backwater planet the location of which he pretended he didn’t know.

“She went in her sleep,” she said gently. “It was peaceful.”

He simply nodded as he tried to keep his tears from falling. Of course her eyes were unabashedly wet, her cheeks tear streaked and red. It was terrifyingly easy for her to show emotion for someone who had spent something like an eternity alone. It was a testament to her strength and he wondered if maybe she was the one that had lessons to teach him rather than it being the other way around.

“Everything was done that could have been. I promise, I even tried…” she trailed off and he knew why. She was weighing the truth, running some sort of uncomfortable cost-benefit analysis on what she could possibly tell him about his mother’s death. That was Rey. Somehow her heart was big enough to hold the rebellion and him, and even more impressively, she had the sense to be able to sort out a balance between the two. He’d thought that maybe she’d shut him out forever but watching her tear up and shift her hands in her lap, as if she wanted to reach out just as badly as he did, made him realize that she hadn’t let him go.

“I know you did,” he said, his voice weak even to his own ears. “I know that you’ve been practicing force healing.”

_ I’ve seen you in flashes, where your concentration lapses and you let me in.  _

He cleared his throat, to no avail as he struggled to not tell her all the things he longed to let her know. “Thank you for trying.”

He saw the curious way she looked at him, and he hoped that she wouldn’t ask about all the things he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to lie to her, but the truth would be even worse. If she knew that he watched her, if she addressed the moments where they both pretended that they couldn’t see the other, he was afraid that they’d have to put an end to them. It was already so tiring trying to keep her out as much as he did, and he knew that it was the same for her. He’d seen the bags beneath her eyes, the restlessness he felt on her side of the bond when he knew that she should be asleep. He had already thought that for one of them to attempt to push the other out any more would probably kill them both from the effort.

Rey nodded in acknowledgment of his thanks and looked away from him, out a window that he couldn’t see but knew to be there. He could never see everything around her, just what she was touching, but that was enough when he knew the bunk below her. She wanted to say something more, he knew it, but she was thinking better of everything, lest he learn more than he needed to know, lest she inform the enemy.

“She was strangely proud of you in the last days,” she said, deciding evidently that there was no harm in telling him something that he could scarcely believe anyway. “The ban on slavery you announced on the holo-net, it was something that she worked on in the senate wasn’t it?”

He saw something in her eye, and he wondered if she knew that it was something that he’d been after for a very long time. He’d always loathed the idea of people forced to do or be something against their will. He wondered if she was glad for it too. After all, she was all but a slave herself as a child, and it wasn’t as if either of them was blind to that fact.

He longed to tell her about his plan, about how once he put Hux into his place, he was intending to end the Trooper program as part of the ban. He loathed hypocrisy most of all, so it was a necessary step. His heart skipped as he thought to tell her that this was what he had been attempting to promise when he offered her the galaxy.

“She thought that, despite the violence, you were at least attempting to be a fair leader.”

There was something like a strange swell of pride in his heart even if he couldn’t fully accept hearing that he’d nearly made his mother proud. His fingers twitched in his lap, torn between wanting to reach out to her and up to his forehead where he could still feel his mother’s parting gift. The part of him that was still holding on to the name Kylo Ren told him to stay still.

Of course, she was the one to reach out first. He could see a lurking ferocity in her expression, as if she were ready to slap him, but when he felt her touch his knee, he covered her hand with his own. He’d rather take the fat lip than miss out on the opportunity to accept her comfort.

It was almost frightening to him how quickly he felt himself calm when touched by her. It was a simple gesture, kind, something a warm-hearted person might offer a grieving stranger if facing them, but to him it meant so much more. She was still angry, he could feel it, but her anger didn’t stem from hate, instead coming from the opposite.

He let his tears fall, and he felt her push forward, closer to him, her other hand moving up to rest against his cheek as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He wept like a child and felt himself being pulled into her arms. He cried for his mother, for the parts of himself that he had tried to kill off, for his father, and for Rey, because no matter how close she held him and no matter how much they wanted her to, she could never pull him into her world.

Falcon (Rey’s Room)/Coruscant (Supreme Leader’s Chambers)

Rey had long since given up on blocking him out at night. It was a waste of energy and he never tried to pry anyway. She could trust him that much because she would be able to tell if he attempted anything and even more so because he’d had better chances in the past and hadn’t tried. Truthfully, she slept better when he was around and from the looks of him, the color in his cheeks and the reduction of his undereye bags, it was a mutual benefit. Getting a good night’s sleep was enough incentive for a truce of sorts.

It was rare enough anyway that they were on the same cycle, so she allowed herself to believe that there was no risk in it. It didn’t mean, of course, that she would let him think that she was happy with the arrangement. It was for show and for her own sanity that she made her malcontent known each night.

She had a feeling that he knew, just as much a she did, that it was all a performance, but he never said anything when they woke up tangled together. He rarely teased her about who she was, who they were, and he didn’t argue with her when she shot him a look of annoyance if a comment was less than flattering. He took it all with a weak smile or a half-hearted comeback and she appreciated it. As always, he was the one to get her.

“You’re taking up the whole bed,” she groaned as she wiggled to get comfortable. Of course, she knew that technically she was taking up space on his bed in return, it was all about perspective, but her bunk was small compared to his bed and it felt unfair that she couldn’t just roll over and be taking up part of the empty expanse that he had available to him.

“Technically,” he said with a chuckle that made her feel warm in all the right ways, “you’re taking up too much space on my bed.”

“You’ve got plenty of room,” she said with a sigh.

“I do, but you’re taking up room on both of my beds right now. Technically I can take up as much space as I want because it’s all mine.”

“You gave up on your claim on the Falcon years ago,” she reminded with a shove at him that had the fortunate and unfortunate consequence of putting her rear into his hips.

He wrapped his arm around her waist, keeping her there while shifting so that his chin rested atop her head. She hoped that he couldn’t see or sense the flush that was rapidly coating her cheeks.

“Sure, sweetheart,” he muttered quietly in the sweet teasing tone he only took on when he was too tired to keep it at bay, “Doesn’t change the fact that this was my bunk first, that no matter what you think, you’ve been sleeping in my room even when we’re not together.”

A shiver ran down her spine, one that she enjoyed and hated to admit that she did. She had of course had a feeling that her space may have been his first. It made sense with the proximity to his father’s room and the fact that it was one of the few single rooms on the ship. She didn’t want to admit that what had really told her was the way in which she had been attracted to the room in the first place.

She had told herself that it was just the room that Chewie had given her because she didn’t want to remember that it was the room that she had asked him for. She didn’t want to admit that she always felt closer to Ben in the space and that it was something that she’d hoped was true since she left Crait and felt something strangely akin to his Force signature lingering in the space.

“You abandoned it,” she whispered, all her scavenger spirit attempting to put up something like a mock fight over ownership as he pulled her closer into his chest.

“Tell yourself that if it’s what you need to hear,” he responded, all but purring into her ear, “Is Chandrila still the passcode?”

She was melting into him, and it felt so right that she had to remind herself it was wrong. There was something different about him tonight. He was more playful than usual, acting like he did when he was overtired, but with more energy than he was usually able to muster. A strange thought struck her just as she realized his hands were bare for the first time.

“Ben?” she asked, careful in her use of his name when she was unsure of just how he was doing, “Have you been drinking?”

She felt his breath tickle her ear when he sighed, and she couldn’t help but close her eyes as she enjoyed the sensation. He didn’t smell of alcohol, it was something she knew she’d recognize, but he was acting like he was under its influence for sure.

“No,” he said gently, “I don’t drink much. I don’t like being that out of control.”

She could certainly respect that, and frankly she was strangely comforted by it.

“Sorry,” she said in return, clearly overtired herself as she felt the need to apologize. “You just seem a bit… fuzzy?”

It wasn’t just his actions and words that tipped her off. When she focused on him, on the energy around him, his signature in the Force, she could sense something off. He always felt strong to her, solid, like an ancient tree when calm or a waterfall when upset, but as she focused on him now, his energy fluttered around the edges. She had the sense that he was having a difficult time keeping himself together. It was so simple to connect to him, to tap into his energy, that it seemed to take more effort to not let herself into his mind than it would most days to enter it. She forced herself to pull away, to allow him to give her a response without seeking it. Despite what common sense told her, despite the half hearted voice in her head that said “exploit the enemy”, she couldn’t bring herself to breech his trust.

“Well I was drugged,” he said in an odd tone that she almost took for a joke if it weren’t for the fact that it made sense that he was under the influence of something.

She attempted to sit up and turn towards him, to see him and assure herself that he was alright, but he was holding her too tightly and she didn’t want to fight against his embrace.

“Don’t worry sweetheart, I’m alright. I think they were trying to poison my drink, but they got the dosage wrong. I’m tired and…‘fuzzy’.” He laughed again as if he truly thought her word choice was amusing. “But I had a med droid test my blood and I should be fine by morning.”

“I wasn’t worried,” she muttered with an air of haughtiness that they both knew was entirely fake. She hadn’t heard of any Resistance plots to poison him, but she wasn’t in much on the daily operations of the rebellion. They tended to leave her alone to her training and only call upon her for missions for which she was needed and for the propaganda holos they’d insisted on posting on the ‘net.

He hummed in response, and she could sense him falling asleep already. She was strangely calmed by it, and it helped her as she thought through the most likely possibility for who was trying to poison his dinner.

“Hux?” she asked, unsurprised by the immediate nod she felt translated through his chin and the top of her head where it was rested.

“Is it Chandrila?” he asked again, cutting her off from asking any additional questions, taking his own turn. “That’s where I was born. I said it was a stupid passcode, but Dad…” He trailed off. “It was easy to remember.”

Rey let the pause hang between them for a moment. There was something about the energy between them, a strange almost comfort that enveloped them that was more than they’d ever had before. She thought that maybe it was vulnerability that made it, but no matter what the reason was, she savored it, committing it to memory the best she could as she shifted her head into a more comfortable position and closed her eyes to sleep.

“Yes.”

First Order Transport Ship

His hands couldn’t stay still. He was fiddling with the controls like a child just learning to fly, flipping switches and then unflipping them when he realized that it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He felt as if he were going mad, unable to control himself as his mind reminded him of everything he’d ever done wrong in his entire life and the few things he’d finally done right today. The only thing that soothed him was that despite his attempts to keep her out, he could feel Rey getting closer to him. He wondered if she could sense it too.

He rested his hands in his lap and took a deep breath before closing his eyes. Behind his lids he could remember the shocked look on Mitaka’s face as he’d led him and a small group of other First Order members to the launch bay. It had been a whim, covering their escape from the Finalizer before he left himself, but he’d felt their barely hidden desire to leave the Order when Hux began to call more and more for the return of the trooper program, for the destruction of nations and the killing of Force sensitive children.

He could barely keep Hux from poisoning him correctly as of late, and if it weren’t for his knowledge that there were far more supporters of Hux on the ship, in the new Imperial court, and generally in the Order in its totality, he would have strangled the man before he left. Of course, it would have been enjoyable to watch the light leave the redheaded bastard’s eyes, but even he couldn’t take on a ship full of men and women with guns alone, so his only hope had been to take as many people with some decency remaining within them off the ship before he left himself. He wasn’t cruel. At least he wasn’t anymore.

He’d given them instructions to find the nearest inhabited planet, dump the transport and find a way to head home to whatever families they had. He was aware that his kindness would be purported as something quite different by any rebellion member, as to them he’d just let several war criminals escape, but he was the son of a smuggler and he found it easy to be like his father when it came to protecting people with good left in them. He secretly wondered whether his actions would have made his parents proud, even if only for a moment.

It was far too late to ask.

He felt the ship lunge to the side and was jostled away from his thoughts. He’d flown himself into a gravitational field, and it was a miracle that he had the good sense not to overcorrect himself into a nearby debris field. As he focused again on flying, he realized that now out of lightspeed he’d ended up on the edge of a stellar nursery. He’d nearly been distracted enough to fly himself through a Protostar.

He hadn’t seen one since he was a child, and he was so stricken by it that he took a few moments to simply sit and stare. It wasn’t as if they were particularly rare, stars were being born and dying every single day. They were a lot like people in that way, but there was something about the birth of a star, when caught in the right moment, that was awe inspiring.

His father had called it good luck.

He closed his eyes for a moment, confident that the transport was stable enough in its hovering state to keep him out of any real danger. If he reached out, beyond Rey, but also to her, he could almost feel a touch, gentle on his face. Luck had been his father’s business, but wisdom had been his mother’s.

She had called it a molecule cloud collapsing under its own mass, the force behind the blow back of everything that made it so dense creating visible light.

He thought that maybe they were both right as he lingered, feeling close to them and yet so very far away. He frowned to himself, eyes still closed and reached out before him like a child in the dark. He felt the Force around him, the energy that was on the verge of falling in on itself, the massiveness of it all on the precipice of creating something new.

It was only when he opened his eyes and dropped his hand that he realized it wasn’t the star at all.

For once in his life, he was free to take a moment to breathe. He felt Rey’s presence call out to him, she was so close now, and it pulled him. The pull felt less urgent now, calmer, as if she’d sensed his quiet moment and wanted to allow it to continue.

He took another moment to revel in the strange sense of newness that surrounded him, the explosive joining of disparate matter that created the star felt almost laughably familiar. In fact, he may have laughed if it weren’t for the choked sob threatening to escape his throat as he turned his attentions again to the controls and Rey’s nearness became too much to bear waiting for.

Somehow, he felt lucky.

He prepared himself to land short minutes later when he saw the small planet through the viewport. He’d seen it before in flashes of memory that she hadn’t hidden well. He told himself that she had wanted him to see it, and while the more cautious part of his mind reminded him that it could be a trap, it hardly mattered to him.

He’d die happy if only he could get his ship down and see her one more time.

He adjusted the controls with greater confidence as his mind replayed much more comforting memories. Rey fighting at his side in the throne room just short years earlier, her gentle comforting of him when his mother passed away, all the nights they shared almost together and yet so far away. He thought of the last night, the one that had broken him, the one where she’d kissed him while half awake, the one where she’d all but pulled him into her sweet dreams, the one where he saw the future she’d imagined for them when their hands had touched. He’d seen them both together, free out in the galaxy, somewhere green in a little house locked in a lover’s embrace.He’d seen everything she’d ever wanted in that shared dream, and he’d realized that it was all he’d ever wanted in return. The galaxy be damned, he just wanted that peace with her, and he would do anything to get it if he died trying.

_ I’m coming sweetheart. _

He faked his own confidence, lying to himself for the last time that he wasn’t afraid as he landed on the Temple Island of Ahch-To. He could feel her, not far off, and their bond hummed. It felt like his ears were ringing as he grabbed his gift to her off the co-pilot’s seat and lowered the ramp at the rear of the ship to disembark. Walking through the durasteel compartment of the ship’s interior felt as if he were running through a never-ending corridor. He couldn’t get off the ship quickly enough.

The island was just like what he had seen in her mind, and he couldn’t imagine her being anywhere else in the galaxy but there. The sound of waves and birds was the first thing that caught his attention as he left the ship. The sensation of life existing around him was intense and he saw her standing a distance away, facing him. The Force was strong here, but he couldn’t get a full grasp of her mental state as he usually could when he was miles away. His heart was racing and he just allowed himself to be pulled to her.

He wanted to run, but he didn’t. It felt foolish to walk towards her so slowly when the energy between them felt as if it alone could pull them together. They were like two magnets, two clouds of energy and particles crashing together to form something whole for this first time. He was hyper aware of sound of the water and the birds and the rustling of the tall grass as he stepped through it.

The dew soaked into his pant legs as he approached her, and she watched him come to her with an unsmiling face and a tall posture. She looked positively royal to him, standing tall in her grey robes, the afternoon light of the planet’s twin suns crowning her head.

He fell to his knees before her, feet away exemplifying all the ways he felt unworthy of being directly upon the ground she walked on, and held up what he’d brought.

Rey looked down at him, at the cold metal in his hands. He’d brought her the shackles with which to bind him.

He felt her move to him, though his eyes were on the grass below them. The sounds of the island were fading away as he felt her arms surround him.

"I won’t ask you for forgiveness,” he said.

“And I won’t give it to you,” she replied, her cheek pressed against his as she held him. “Ben Solo has done nothing that needs to be forgiven.”

Her words deepened the crack that had already formed within him, and he fell apart as her fingers tangled into his hair and roamed across his back. He listened to her breathing and dropped the shackles between them so that he could pull her into him the same way he was being pulled into her.

He took a deep breath, inhaling her, and it felt as if it were the first time he’d been able to breathe since he was a far younger man. He felt the tears fall from her eyes as if they were his own, as if he were both himself and her as they sat there in the grassy fields of Ahch-to and witnessed together the final death of Kylo Ren and the rebirth of two souls that would come to be known throughout the galaxy as Ben and Rey Organa-Solo.

 


End file.
